Working Title: Fall Webworms

 The steps of my project for printmaking class's portfolio exchange:

1. Planning out the image. I decided to expand on the theme of insects that I have been working on for the past year. For this project, I needed to incorporate a woodblock print with silkscreen on a 22 x 30 sheet of paper. Here I am sketching the composition.








I don't have a picture of the first two layers of woodblock, but i printed two transparent layers of gray onto a tan sheet of Rives BFK paper. Left: the first 3 layers of ink on the good paper. Center image: proofing the last layer on a sheet of newsprint. Right: the fourth layer of ink. I was so happy to see how fast cobalt drier works, it cuts time between printing down to a quarter of the time it used to take! (What used to take 2-7 days to dry now takes 12-24 hours). I used stencils to keep areas of the background clean during printing.

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The final step is planning where the layers of silkscreen will go. I drew each color with a paint marker on a sheet of acetate and then exposed this onto my screen. This image only shows the first layer of woodblock printing, I'll take another picture of how it will look over the final image. The acetate has several layers that will be printed over one another, so the image will really only have 4 caterpillars: the one at the top right, center and center right, and bottom left corner (not the black shapes).